Lead Me to the Cross

On Sunday I was traveling to Franklin, NC to speak share my testimony about the OCC. I was looking forward to meeting new people, but was dreading to drive up the curvy mountain. By curvy I mean that you have to drive no faster than 30 mph. My trip started out just fine until I noticed a car was following me way too close for my comfort zone. At that moment I had to make a choice of either continue to drive normally or to pull aside and let the car pass me. I chose the latter one.

Because I chose to pull to the side to let the car pass me, I was blessed by a beautiful view of colorful trees and a reminder how majestic is the God that I serve. Each tree was different; some trees were covered with red leaves, others with yellow, brown and green. Needless to say the view was breath taking. As I attempted to take pictures of God’s beautiful creation, I was reminded that I serve artistic God who crafted you and me to be different. Some people are blessed with gift of teaching, others with gift of compassion and the list goes on and not one person is alike, just like not one tree that I was admiring was alike. But just as each tree radiated true beauty of nature, each human being radiates beauty of God’s perfect creation.

It never seizes to amaze me that I was so special to God that He knew me before I was born. Jeremiah 1:5 says, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart for my holy purpose.” God knew and numbered all my days before I was even born, isn’t it amazing? Psalm 139:16 says, “your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”

My friend, I hope today you can take comfort in knowing that God carefully crafted you, because He loved you first. He has been plans for you, if you will only yield to His Sovereign will.

Tightwad's Savings

I had a pretty good shopping week. We didn’t have to have anything in particular so I shopped at Bi-Lo and Ingles for sales items. I snagged a few boxes of muffins and a few boxes of dessert for $0.25 each. Because I was planning to make my very first dish of mac & cheese, I bought cheese and butter that wasn’t really on sale, but I didn’t care too much that I did not have a coupon for it. I was a little shocked at how much real butter cost nowadays.

Prunes were on sale B1G1 this week and after sales and coupons I paid around $0.25 a bag. We were out of rice so I bought Rice Select brand, which I love sushi rice (makes the best sticky rice). The rice was pricy, but it lasts us for a while. Oh I did also stop by Aldi and bought 2 packs of frozen raspberries. I think next time I will buy vanilla ice cream and mix it up with raspberries. Yum!



Total spent: $26.75



Total saved: $34.31

I am done with school!!!

(all the magazines that I will read on vacation)

It is done. It is over. It is complete.

After I graduated college, I had no plans of continuing my education. However, once Daniel and I got married, the word “masters” began to creep in our every day conversation. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to spend hours on homework all while working full time and being a wife full time. However, my husband encouraged me to consider, especially once we found out that my amazing employer will reimburse 100% if I maintain A average.

I decided to give a try and applied to Southern Wesleyan University located 45 minutes from our home. Class would meet 1 day a week for 4 hours. The idea seemed ok, considering we didn’t have children and my husband was still in school. I I would work 8am to 5 pm and would go to school 1 day a week from 6 pm to 10 pm. Plus we wouldn’t get further in debt with student loans, if I studied hard. So I applied for the program, was accepted and began my class in November 2008.

I have to admit that during the first class I was a bit nervous. On my way to school I wondered if I could juggle school, work and family. I also wondered if I will remember how to study again. But I met some wonderful people in my class and the fear quickly dwindled away. For the next two years I poured sweat and lot of hours into studying business. There were days that I wanted to quit, because I was exhausted physically, mentally and spiritually. There were days that I felt that I made a big mistake by going back to school. There were several days that I cried driving from school, because I had no life outside of studying. But there were also many days that I was grateful that my husband believed in me achieving my goal of finishing MBA program.

So today I am happy to say that this past Tuesday I took my very last MBA class. And I feel like a burden has been lifted off my shoulders. Although my graduation is in December, I am so happy that I will have one month to relax and actually read non school related books. I am thrilled that I can start cooking and spending more time with my husband.

I just wanted to share with you what is going on in our lives.

Organizing and hiding your keys

I do not like when our house gets cluttered. In fact, I feel stressed out when I come home and items are not where they should be. Recently I have been aggravated with the fact that our kitchen counter is always cluttered with house keys and car keys. So I decided to do something about it.

Recently I came across a handy dandy tip that hopefully will help you to be a little bit more organized. I selected a kitchen cabinet that I wanted to be a hiding place for our keys.



Inside of the cabinet I attached 2 hooks.



I then placed all gazillion keys that we have on the hooks.



The beauty of this tip is that I no longer have to spend 30 minutes looking for keys. Plus they are hidden so no one sees them and we no longer have keys cluttering our kitchen counters. You can also hang measuring cups and other kitchen tools.

Steak, rice and gravy

I work with a friend, who always makes brings yummy looking homemade lunches. I noticed that her rice and gravy always looks wonderful, so I decided to ask her for a recipe. When I tried it at home, the results were great because my husband ate every single bite of steak, rice and gravy that I made.


I used 3 Chef Requested round steaks. I coated each steak in flour and fry them on the pan until each side was golden brown. Then I added enough water in the pan to cover the steaks. I cooked until steaks were done and the water was thickened and turned into gravy.



I took the steaks out and cut them up in small pieces. When the steaks were cooling, I added several spoons of flour in a bowl and added enough milk to dilute the flour. Since the steaks were no longer in the pan, but the brown gravy was still cooking, I added milk mixture in the gravy. This created yummy white gravy to go over rice.

I mixed gravy, steak and rice together, which created a delicious and easy dinner.

My Swagbucks Prizes

When I first heard about Swagbucks over a year ago, I was very skeptical about making money by doing regular searches online. Thankfully I decided to try it for myself and today I want to report to you that in a period of 1 year I have earned $100 in amazon gift cards.

This week I received several items that I ordered for myself using money in my amazon account.


Since I have been dying to start making artisan bread, I was thrilled to purchase two buckets to mix my dough in. I also bough a timer to make sure that my bread won’t be overcooked or under cooked. The best part is that I didn’t have to pay a penny out of pocket.

What are you waiting for? Go sign up! To get started visit http://swagbucks.com/refer/oxinabox1 and because you will be going through me (oxinabox1), by signing up you will automatically earn 30 Swagbucks. Then if you refer a friend and they sign up, when they earn a Swagbuck you will automatically earn it too up to 1000 Swagbucks! Each day you can do your normal searches through swagbucks.com and earn free point for something that you would normally do anyways. To make things easier you can download a tool bar, but if you don’t want to do that just make sure you sign in when you log on to swagbucks.com. By simply searching using swagbucks search engine instead of google, you will begin to accumulate swagbucks (points) that you can later redeem for prizes or gift cards.

Have you had much success with using swagbucks?

Can TV really drain your wallet?

Are you in the market for a new flat screen TV? Well, I have a tip for you, my friend! No, I am not going to give you a coupon to help you save money, but I will give you a piece of advice that I hope will help you save money years to come. This week I came across a very interesting article in a magazine that we receive from our energy provider. The article compared watts usage of a big screen TV and a fridge. Ok, so I knew that fridge, washing machine and dryer machine are the most energy sucking devices, however my eyes were opened when I learned that brand new high definition TVs use as much electricity as a refrigerator.

I re-read the article several time just to make sure that I read it correctly the first time. And yes, I was correct. For example, 42 to 65 inch plasma screen TVs consumes 240 to 400 watts, which is at much as a fridge. But LCD screens that are 21 to 49 inches consume approximately 111 watts. So next time you are at the store buying a TV ask a sales representative about watts usage and buy a model with the lowest watts consumption. You will be a happy camper, when you electric bill arrive in the mail.